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Apparently fake news is a thing in France, too. And apparently it was rampant during the run up to the just concluded presidential election. Emmanuel Macron won by a large margin but it seems there was a lot semi-truths being thrown about. To help combat the spate of fake news surrounding the election, J. Walter Thompson Paris worked with French news organization Liberation to create CheckNews.fr , a search engine staffed by actual human journalists for three days leading up to the election. These journalists answered any search query made with links to multiple sources providing truthful answers to each query....
Narrative gravity is like confirmation bias, “the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one’s beliefs.” But with narratives, it’s less about personal beliefs and more of a bandwagon effect, where everyone processes and interprets information through a framework that is both easily digestible and broadly accepted. Narrative gravity is what makes a startup’s story clock tick. Narrative gravity exists beyond tech. It’s why Senator John McCain is still considered a maverick and why Tiger Woods’ big comeback is always right around the corner. The gravitational pull of a prevailing narrative is hard to resist....
This drives journalists nuts. They feel a duty to rebut lies, and in the age of “John Oliver Destroys Something” headlines, there’s an appetite among liberal viewers for plucky correspondents eviscerating right-wing ideologues on-air. We’ve now seen one host after another—Todd, Cuomo, Anderson Cooper—lose his cool or waste a long interview trying to make Conway acknowledge elementary facts.
Of course, presidential flacks have always tried to stretch or shade the truth during on-air interviews. In his first briefings as press secretary to President George W. Bush, Ari Fleischer juggled contrary rationales for tax cuts, that the government could afford them or that a weak economy needed them, using whichever argument seemed to fit the evidence presented. In his first briefings as press secretary to President Obama,
Robert Gibbs used the term “financial stability package” to mask the stench of corporate bailouts. Reporters understood that no matter what they asked, Fleischer would defend tax cuts and Gibbs would defend bailouts. But the president’s spokesman would generally try to reconcile the president’s agenda with the facts. And if he couldn’t, he would at least clarify the agenda. Conway brings none of that. She alters unwelcome questions, disregards the facts presented to her, and clarifies nothing. In part, that’s because Trump has no organized agenda. All he has is ego. So that’s what she fights for. She’s not there to persuade a skittish Republican senator to repeal the Affordable Care Act. She’s there to defend and avenge one man’s wounded pride....
We’re only three weeks into the new year, but “fake news” could already be the phrase of the year. After reports suggested that fake news on Twitter and Facebook contributed to Donald Trump’s win in last year’s US Presidential election, the latter is finally clamping down on the issue. The company has announced new tools to curb fake news in Germany, presumably as a measure ahead of the country’s August 2017 elections. “Last month we announced some tests to address the issue of fake news on Facebook,” Aine Kerr, the company’s manager of journalism partnerships, wrote in a press release....
We — John Borthwick and Jeff Jarvis — want to offer constructive suggestions for what the platforms — Facebook, Twitter, Google, Instagram, Snapchat, WeChat, Apple News, and others — as well as publishers and users can do now and in the future to grapple with fake news and build better experiences online and more civil and informed discussion in society.
Key to our suggestions is sharing more information to help users make better-informed decisions in their conversations: signals of credibility and authority from Facebook to users, from media to Facebook, and from users to Facebook. Collaboration between the platforms and publishers is critical. In this post we focus on Facebook, Twitter, and Google search. Two reasons: First simplicity. Second: today these platforms matter the most.
We do not believe that the platforms should be put in the position of judging what is fake or real, true or false as censors for all. We worry about creating blacklists. And we worry that circular discussions about what is fake and what is truth and whose truth is more truthy masks the fact that there are things that can be done today. We start from the view that almost all of what we do online is valuable and enjoyable but there are always things we can do to improve the experience and act more responsibly.
In that spirit, we offer these tangible suggestions for action and seek your ideas.
Google has agreed to fund a project to develop automated fact checking tools amid anger over the prevalent of fake news websites during the US presidential election.
UK fact checking organisation, FullFact, has announced it has been awarded €50,000 (£43,000) by the tech giant’s Digital News Initiative to build the first “fully automated end-to-end fact checking system”.
In a statement, FullFact explained that the system will have two main features.
One will inform readers if something reported as fact has already been proven inaccurate.
The other mode will fact check claims automatically using Natural Language Processing and statistical analysis in real-time – something FullFact said has never been done before – by highlighting the text and having a factbox appear when the user hovers over it....
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Good things can happen when a crowd goes to work on trying to figure out a problem in journalism. At the same time, completely crowdsourced news investigations can go bad without oversight — as when, for example, a group of Redditors falsely accused someone of being the Boston Marathon bomber. An entirely crowdsourced investigation with nobody to oversee it or pay for it will probably go nowhere. At the same time, trust in the media is low and fact-checking efforts have become entwined with partisan politics. So what would happen if you combined professional journalism with fact checking by the people? On Monday evening, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales launched Wikitribune, an independent site (not affiliated with Wikipedia or the Wikimedia Foundation) “that brings journalists and a community
of volunteers together” in a combination that Wales hopes will combat fake news online — initially in English, then in other languages....
You can count the Department of Agriculture as the latest federal agency under attack from Donald Trump who is now actively rebelling against him. After Trump punished the National Park Service for tweeting about his inauguration crowd size, and the Badlands was forced to delete its tweets about climate change, these agencies have begun sticking it to Trump by rolling out secondary non-government Twitter accounts that he can’t control. Lo and behold, the unofficial USDA Twitter account.
The @AltUSDA account on Twitter has been in existence for less than a day but already has tens of thousands of followers, and it’s been posting helpful tweets along the lines of “Read the USDA Climate Change Solutions page while you still can” along with a link to an article on the usda.gov website which, for the moment at least, is still visible. It’s expected that the Trump administration will forcibly remove such information in order to pretend that climate change isn’t real. But @AltUSDA is going further....
What can this small chapter tell us about what’s to come? That Trump will be what columnist Frida Ghitis of the Miami Herald calls “the gaslighter in chief” — that he will pull out all the stops to make people think that they should believe him, not their own eyes. (“Gaslighting” is a reference to the 1940s movie in which a manipulative husband psychologically abuses his wife by denying the reality that the gaslights in their home are growing dimmer and dimmer.) “The techniques,” Ghitis wrote, “include saying and doing things and then denying it, blaming others for misunderstanding, disparaging their concerns as oversensitivity, claiming outrageous statements were jokes or misunderstandings, and other forms of twilighting the truth.”...
“Slightly disconcertingly, Lewis says he is “so thrilled” by the controversy. This is not because American voters were misled but because Facebook and Google have been embarrassed and forced to reconsider the complex algorithms they deploy to present news articles to their users. It’s a matter of schadenfreude. Lewis has spent much of the three years since he became chief executive at Dow Jones and publisher of the Wall Street Journal “badgering away” at Google and Facebook, trying to persuade them to change their news distribution methods. “We kept warning them, saying ‘This is an accident waiting to happen – you are treating fake news in the same way as you are treating Wall Street Journal news. This is going to end up biting you.’ And so here it is, biting them!”...
The day after the election, news began swirling around social media that New York Times columnist David Brooks had called for President-elect Donald Trump’s assassination. Snopes managing editor Brooke Binkowski had a feeling it was fake. Because, come on now, would a prominent columnist for a reputable news outlet really make that kind of comment? Snopes has made its business out of correcting the misunderstood satire, malicious falsehoods, and poorly informed gossip that echoes across the internet — and that business is booming. Traffic jumped 85 percent over the past year to 13.6 million unique visitors in October, according to comScore. The site supports itself through advertising, and in the last three years it has made enough money to quadruple the size of its staff.
Sure enough, a bit of Snopes reporting revealed that Brooks had written a column saying Trump would likely resign or be impeached within a year. A news item published on The Rightists claimed Brooks had then said in an interview for KYRQ Radio New York that Trump should be killed. Snopes found The Rightists doesn’t even pretend to traffic in truth. In the site’s “about” section, it describes itself this way: “This is HYBRID site of news and satire. part [sic] of our stories already happens, part, not yet. NOT all of our stories are true!” What’s more, the story’s facts didn’t add up. For example, the site claimed Brooks had made the comments on a radio station — KYRQ — that didn’t exist.
Paul Horner is a professional fake news writer, whose completely made-up story about the Amish committing their vote to Trump got over 134,000 likes on Facebook; his story about Obama signing an executive order to invalidate the election results has over 250,000 likes. This week, The Washington Post’s Caitlin Dewey interviewed Horner--who is stunned that his work gets accepted as true. “I think Trump is in the White House because of me. His followers don’t fact-check anything -- they’ll post everything, believe anything. His campaign manager posted my story about a protester getting paid $3,500 as fact. Like, I made that up. I posted a fake ad on Craigslist… I thought they’d fact-check it, and it’d make them look worse. I mean that’s how this always works: Someone posts something I write, then they find out it’s false, then they look like idiots. But Trump supporters -- they just keep running with it! They never fact-check anything!”...
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JWT fights fake news in France. Formidable!